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Polemic Paper from the year 2021 in the subject Theology - Historic Theology, Ecclesiastical History, grade: 1.0, Kwame Nkrumah University, language: English, abstract: This article aims at examining the Catholic Church's indefensible and ambivalent position on homosexuality vis-à-vis the Catholic priesthood. I conclude that while its teaching is clear, in my view erroneous, its practice is ambivalent due to the many gay priests among its ranks, even some would say, up to the highest level of cardinals as the recent McCarrick Report (2020) by the Vatican Secretariat of State revealed.On one level, the answer to the question whether gay men, and by extension gay women, should be admitted to the Catholic priesthood or not is a straightforward affirmative. They should. This is probably a left of centre position. It is my position. Carlo Maria Viganò calls it "an anti-Church of heretics, corrupt men and fornicators" who include "the Vatican Sanhedrin" or what he calls "the deep Church" as I have mentioned below. It would argue with evidence in bucket loads that there are already gay clerics - both high and low - in the Catholic priesthood but only men, I hasten to add. I know a handful. In my erstwhile career as a Catholic seminary lecturer, I personally knew a gay priest colleague, an amiable fellow if ever there was one. There was queer talk about him wherever he had been posted but nothing concrete until at his last post he was reported to the Zambian police for sexual abuse of two teenage boys. May be if it had not been for the age of his victims, he might still be in the gay closet.
About the author
Tarcisius Mukuka [Dipl. Pastoral Theol & Counselling, Dipl. Phil. & Rel. Studies, STB, SSL, PhD] is a biblical exegete by training. He holds a Licentiate in Biblical Exegesis from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome and a doctorate in Biblical Hermeneutics from the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom. His doctoral dissertation was entitled "Orality as Casualty: Contextual and Postcolonial Analysis of Biblical Hermeneutics in Bembaland" (2014). He is currently a lecturer in Religious Studies Education at Kwame Nkrumah University in Kabwe. His research interests include postcolonialism and the Bible, gender and the Bible, religion, politics and power. He is the author of "Spoken Voice/Written Word: Negotiating How We Hear/Read the Bible" (2016) published by Lambert Academic Publishing and "In the Eye of a Very Catholic Storm" (forthcoming), by Crown Arts Publishers
